A rather “personal side of strategy” (by George Raikos)

As “New Age Children”, we have learned to grow fast, succeed often and fail even more often, take the shortcut, eat fast –food rather than sit to the family table, change partners when they go bad on us, watch TV throughout the weekends (and we call that fun!), hit the subway and fail to meet eye-to-eye with a single person (or when we do, we shy away), feel awkward when someone says good morning in the elevator, fail to see the landscape as we drive while we speak all the way over the bionic extension to our ears called mobile phone, (not too much of a mobile when it acts as our landline on the house, with the exception you can not claim you missed the call)…

All I can see in the above picture of a typical person of our modern society is a fast track to mental overdrive, burn-out and depression, all before the age of 30 or less. And I can not trace any statistics or studies on how the new video-game-trained, avatar-based Generation B2C (Breed to Consume) on how their body and psyche will be affected by this petabytes of images and videos thrown right at their face letting them helpless in a black-hole type of visual and sensual role-playing immersion…

Psychologists can hardly keep up with the pace of their patients “impatient” please-liberate-me type of “sessions” and the pharmaceutical companies are finding it even harder to resist the temptation of releasing yet another anti-depressant miraculous all-purpose-drug, even before the disease it cures hits the American Psychiatric Society list of “official” mental diseases.

I wonder, amidst this frenzy of mental activity chaotic one-way flow of information, how often one, Just ONE, takes the courage to say STOP! Wait a minute! Isn’t something wrong with this picture? I did not design this path in my life. I did not plan for this. I was never asked if I want This!!!

This simple step,” the WHY? Moment” of one’s realization of the “Virtualization” of his life, however small it may seem, takes a lot of courage to be able to pull through, because the moment you ask yourself that question and begin to share it with others in your peer group, the “peers” start behaving unlike peers and become a pack of wolves charging at you, You, who dared to defy compliance with the rules.

You see my dear fellow humans, declaring your humanity is a straight way to “straight-jackets” if you fail to comply long enough and hard enough. The “System” seems to resist the “Neo”-type of guys who find the flaws in the code of our virtual lives and cause the system to crash… But is is exactly these Neos that we need so much to point-out the Reality, the truth about our lives, what we gave up and at what cost. Your previous “Reality” can not simply stand the debugging process, once you become better in asking more Why’s and persisting for an answer, an answer that validated human existence vis-à-vis the basic Human Rights.

And interesting enough, as you start to feel comfortable with the overall dismantling process of “ex-virtualization”, more and more goodies appear in your path, like real friends, real ideas and ideals along with the energy required to become a “missionary of change”, be it a lonely path or a path you share with others. The moment you change, the world starts changing around you. That’s no Secret. That’s empirical testimony of those who dared to walk-the-talk, charged against previously-held axioms and fought for what was dear to them, what was of value to the lot of us, Freedom of Choice in whatever matter or form it manifested.

I would like to take a minute of silence in recognition of their contribution of those Pioneers to my life, to your life, to my son’s life and to the lives of those to come (if we manage as a race to pull through a World War III, or fail the bet on CO2 emissions and ozone layer depletion). All the same, these few people, who stood apart and challenged the status-quo, where indeed large-agents of change, breaking new grounds in the establishment and bringing about pioneering ideas through their completely different perspectives on things.

Their choices, their “Personal Side of Strategy” if you wish, on how to lead their own lives, did not take comfort or personal loss at their account. In fact they were often jailed for many years (like “Mandiba” in recent years) thrown to the fire accused of whitchcraft in the Middle Ages, or vandalized for “false or lack of substantial evidence” in the High Courts of our Western Civilized Societies by highly paid legal representatives of Gonglomorates that were found not to be offering too much of service back to the society.

My Kudos to them. I bow humbly in the memory of their anguish and the amount of their service. I wish my son or your daughter find the guts to make such a personal choice. I will feel that my life has not been wasted on material concerns alone, just like some more “dust in the wind”.

Invictus